


It Doesn't Change a Thing

by MsThunderFrost



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Alpha Jim "Chief" Hopper, Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Billy Hargrove Is Bad at Feelings, Billy Hargrove Lives, Billy Hargrove Needs Love, Billy Hargrove Needs a Hug, Canonical Child Death, Established Relationship, Good Parent Jim "Chief" Hopper, Jim "Chief" Hopper Lives, M/M, Miscarriage, Mpreg, Not Canon Compliant, Omega Billy Hargrove, Parental Jim "Chief" Hopper, Post-Season/Series 03
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-16
Updated: 2020-06-16
Packaged: 2021-03-03 18:40:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,068
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24760195
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MsThunderFrost/pseuds/MsThunderFrost
Summary: “I-I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” Billy is sobbing, his long fingers tangled in his mess of sopping wet, dirty blond curls. He reeks of distress, of anguish and death and loss, and Jim doesn’t know what to do.He’s never seen Billy look so broken before. Not even after Starcourt.“B－,” the blond’s head snaps toward him, and the rest of his name dies in his throat as he’s met with a wide-eyed, panicked stare. Billy’s fingers ghost toward the shower curtain, like he can use it as some sort of barrier to hide behind, his bloodshot eyes darting aside to avoid Jim’s concerned blue.“I’m f-fine. Everything’s f-fine. I...” he sniffles. He needs to turn the water off before he catches a chill. “D-Did I wake you up? G-Go... Go back to bed, and I’ll be in in a minute, o-okay?”
Relationships: Billy Hargrove/Jim "Chief" Hopper
Comments: 2
Kudos: 111





	It Doesn't Change a Thing

**Author's Note:**

> I don't know how I feel about the ending to this, tbh. I feel like I could've added more, but I also kind of like where it ended up. Anywhooooo--this is my first time writing Hopper, so please be gentle. I did my very best to keep him as in-character as possible <3

There is blood in the bathroom. 

This is not unusual, in and of itself. Jim’s bathroom has seen more than its fair share of blood over the last few years－it’s an unfortunate byproduct of living in a town that liked to spit up demonic creatures from the bowels of the earth. But this... this isn’t the result of a battle against a demodog, or of Billy pushing himself too hard and aggravating still-healing wounds from his battle with the Mind Flayer (Billy hated the fact that he was  _ still _ healing almost a year and a half later, that months and months of bedrest hadn’t served as a magical cure-all for the damage done to his body). 

But still... Billy hadn’t done anything particularly strenuous in the last eight or so hours. He’d come to bed a little late, after helping El finish her literature assignment (the one that she had absolutely, unashamedly waited until the last minute to start), and had  _ still _ been asleep when Jim’s body had demanded he go and walk a lap around the cabin after having spent so long－ _ too _ long－lying in one position. So there is really no reason for Billy to be sitting in the bathtub, fully-clothed, shivering beneath the spray of icy water that’s swirling light-pink water down the drain. And Jim’s brain just sort of... shuts down.

“I-I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” Billy is sobbing, his long fingers tangled in his mess of sopping wet, dirty blond curls. He reeks of distress, of anguish and death and  _ loss _ , and Jim doesn’t know what to do. 

He’s never seen Billy look so  _ broken _ before. Not even after Starcourt. 

“B－,” the blond’s head snaps toward him, and the rest of his name dies in his throat as he’s met with a wide-eyed, panicked stare. Billy’s fingers ghost toward the shower curtain, like he can use it as some sort of barrier to hide behind, his bloodshot eyes darting aside to avoid Jim’s concerned blue. 

“I’m f-fine. Everything’s f-fine. I...” he sniffles. He needs to turn the water off before he catches a chill. “D-Did I wake you up? G-Go... Go back to bed, and I’ll be in in a minute, o-okay?”

“Billy...” Jim breathes, “it’s six o’clock in the morning.” Billy’s entire body tenses, which just serves to make him cry harder. “How long have you been in here, omega?”

Billy shakes his head, “I don’t－I don’t know.”

Jim shuts the bathroom door and locks it. Then, he closes the distance between himself and Billy, reaching into the bath to turn off the showerhead. “You’re going to make yourself sick.” He says, “If you won’t tell me what’s wrong, at least let me help you out of those clothes before－,”

“N-No, please! I－,” his arms wrap tight around his abdomen as he shrinks away from me, and I pause.

Jim stops. He realizes, with a kind of soul-crushing ache in his ribs, that Billy is in the midst of a miscarriage. He’s losing a child that he hadn’t told Jim he was carrying, and that’s... a lot to unpack.  _ Too much _ to unpack right now, when he needs to be there for his mate, who’s been sitting in a freezing cold bath for god knows how long, shaking and crying and  _ hurting _ all alone. He knows that Billy’s never been the best at asking for help when he needs it, but... he’s also not kicking Jim out of the room, which he considers a decent start. So he takes a seat on the edge of the tub and brushes damp curls away from Billy’s pretty face and whispers:

“It’s okay.” He’s not the most comforting of men, not by a long shot. But he knows that, if he were to go full-on sugar and spice and everything nice right now, Billy would reject him  _ hard _ . “This isn’t－It’s not your fault. It just...  _ happens _ , sometimes, even when you’ve done everything right.”

Billy looks away, even as Jim continues to stroke his hair. “Y-You have to get ready for work, right?” He scrubs at his eyes, but considering the fact that every last inch of him is soaked, the action only serves to spread the wetness around. “S-Sorry that I used up a-all the hot water.”

“Billy, I...” Billy is staring up at him with those blue, blue eyes, like he’s waiting for the other shoe to drop. “I have some vacation time saved up. If you need me here－,”

“I  _ don’t _ need you,” he winces, able to recognize how  _ harsh _ his words had sounded, even in his emotionally compromised state. “Here. With me. Right now. I... You can go to work, Chief. It’s... It’s okay.”

Jim stares at him for a few minutes in silence. He wants to fight him on this, to tell him that he’s staying, one way or another. But something tells him that pushing the matter will only serve to do more harm than good, “Okay. Yeah, I’ll... Okay.” He sighs, “I’ll pick up some painkillers on the way home, okay? Maybe something greasy?”

“Pizza?” Billy asks, a little bit of light returning to his eyes. Jim would buy his mate twenty pizzas if he thought that there was a chance it might actually make him smile. 

“Sure,” Jim says. Then, “Try to... um... take it  _ easy _ today, alright? And don’t take any of the painkillers that’re in the cabinet. They’re all blood thinners and－,” he cannot help the way that his eyes drift to the drain. “I’ll, um... I’ll get you a towel, alright? Just hang tight for a second.”

They have an absolutely  _ stupid _ number of white towels on hand, which is absolutely not helpful in this situation. He’s eventually able to find an old,  _ old _ towel, that’s been washed so many times, the color has faded from something close to black to a dark, grayish-blue. He hands it to Billy, who stares at him until he sighs and leaves the bathroom to go about the other parts of his morning routine. He wishes that he could do more, but he cannot force Billy to let him help him. The best that he can do right now is to let Billy come to him. Eventually (hopefully), he’ll be in a proper state of mind to discuss what’d happened. Until then...

He’s just finished putting on his uniform when Billy comes shuffling into the bedroom. Other than the rivulets of cloudy water cascading from his hair, he’s rather dry, with the towel tight around his waist. Jim can see the faint, pinkish mess of keloid scars that dot his chest, abdomen, and back, the final dredges of physical evidence of the hell he’d endured almost two years ago. He tears his eyes away before Billy can catch him staring, grabbing a pair of Billy’s soft, fleece-lined sweatpants and one of his own hoodies for the omega to wear. He passes them on without a word, and the omega purrs, beginning to dress himself with slow, careful movements...

Billy’s never been much of a talker. He lets his actions speak for him－and so, when he curls up in Jim’s hoodie and climbs back into bed, wincing a bit as he struggles to make himself comfortable (and finally settles on his side, in a loose imitations of the fetal position, with Jim’s pillow tucked tight against his abdomen), Jim understands. He wishes that he knew how to take the pain away. But it’s not that simple.

And so he takes a seat on the side of the bed and pulls the blankets up over Billy’s body, “This... This doesn’t change anything, you know.” He says.

Billy is silent for a long while. Jim thinks, for a moment, that he’s fallen asleep. But then, in a whisper-quiet voice, he croaks, “It’s not like I ever wanted to have kids, anyway.” 

* * *

The problem is that Billy  _ did _ want to have kids. Very much so. He just hadn’t realized until he’d gone to the doctor for his monthly check-up and she’d told him he was pregnant－about five or so weeks along. 

He wasn’t supposed to be able to get pregnant. His equipment didn’t quite work right after the Mind Fuck had turned him into a human shishkabob, and he’d made his peace with that. Jim had promised him that it was okay, that his newfound infertility didn’t change anything, and Billy... He’d convinced himself that it was for the best. Jim had already lost one child, maybe he didn’t want to try for a second? Which was fine. It was probably something that they should have had a proper conversation about, but Billy had never been one for deep, heartfelt,  _ emotional _ conversations. 

He’d had every intention of telling Jim about the baby. Just as soon as he’d found the words. But then he’d woken－in the middle of the night? the early hours of the morning? he honestly didn’t know, hadn’t thought to look at the clock－feeling...  _ unwell _ . His stomach hurt. It didn’t start out as a stabbing pain, just a... an  _ ache _ . The kind of general ache that accompanied something like the stomach flu, that extended out into his limbs and made him feel so  _ heavy _ . It’d taken  _ so much _ effort to force himself up out of bed, to hide himself away in the little bathroom across the hall. He’d just taken a seat on the toilet when he saw the blood－

And then－Then, it’d hurt so bad, he could barely breathe. 

Jim had already lost one baby. He didn’t deserve this－didn’t deserve to be bound to an omega who couldn’t deliver. Either he could have a baby or he couldn’t. Jim didn’t deserve to have to suffer in limbo, losing child after child to a defective omega who was broken in a way that he could never hope to fix. And so he told him... He told him that he didn’t. Like that would somehow makes all of this better.

A little under two and a half months later, it happens again. El finds the test in the trashcan, unaware that she probably shouldn’t be touching it with her bare hands－or... you know... at all. “What’s this?” She asks.

“Where did you get that?!” He knows, of course. Knows that she’d pulled it up out of the trash. But he waits for her to confirm it, tries to buy himself some time to come up with a semi-convincing lie. 

“It－In the bathroom.” She says. “Are you... Is it bad? Are you hurting? Do I need to tell－,” Billy snatches the test out of her hand, shaking his head frantically. The last thing that he needs is for her to run and tell Jim about－, “Just... you make him happy. A-And if you’re hurting, I want to－,”

“This isn’t something that you can help with kid.” She looks so completely heartbroken by this, he almost,  _ almost _ took it back. But it’s true. Even with her...  _ weird _ , mind-trippy abilities, she can’t fix what’s broken inside of him.

She deflates a little... then steels herself, and tries again, “If I promise not to tell, will you tell me what this is?”

At this point, Billy’s ready to say  _ anything _ if it’ll buy him an extra moment or two of quiet. “It’s a pregnancy test.”

El studies him carefully, “You’re... pregnant?” He knows that he doesn’t look it. He probably won’t make it long enough to actually start to show. But he still cannot help but find it a wee bit unnerving, like she’s looking  _ through _ him instead of  _ at _ him. 

He doesn’t want to say yes. He doesn’t want to make this real. It’ll only hurt more when the inevitable loss comes. And yet he finds himself nodding, “Y-Yeah, I... Yeah. ‘m pregnant.”

El doesn’t tell, though he can tell that she’s curious as to why they’re keeping this a secret. Billy thinks that everything would be okay if he could just make it past the third month. He follows the doctor’s orders to the tee－he even cuts out that stupid Nicorette that the nurses at the hospital had hooked him up with after the Mind Fuck had impaled his lung, since the doctor said there was a  _ small _ chance it could cause harm to his unborn baby. And two days－ _ two fucking days _ －before his goddamned checkup, he’d woken in a literal pool of his own blood, in too much pain to even consider trying to stand. 

Jim was out of town taking El to visit colleges. He wouldn’t be back for another week. Billy doesn’t know who to call, and so he goes at it alone, suffering and crying and  _ screaming _ into the void. He wishes his body were back to normal, that he’d never had a fucking interdimensional space  _ fuck _ tear his brain, and his body, to ribbons. He wishes that the forces of nature would take pity on him and make him  _ infertile _ , so that he wouldn’t have to keep reaching out to grasp some intangible dream of parenthood. He wishes.  _ Fuck _ , he wishes. 

If Jim notices the fact that Billy bought them a new mattress while he and El were away, he doesn’t comment on it.

* * *

Jim knows that Billy has been avoiding him. He’s ninety-nine percent sure it has something to do with his miscarriage, and he’s reminded, with a sinking in his gut, that they never had the chance to have a proper discussion about what’d happened. Time had gotten away from them. 

Almost  _ six months _ had gotten away from them. 

Billy is sitting on the couch, with his legs tucked up underneath him, reading. Billy spends a great deal of his time reading－he finds it to be a particularly useful passtime when attempting to ignore other people around him. He’s currently on his third re-read of Stephen King’s  _ Carrie _ , and doing a fantastic job of ignoring his mate, who is seated on the opposite end of the couch, flipping through endless channels of  _ nothing _ in the hopes of finding  _ something _ to fill the silence. It certainly does not escape the alpha’s notice that Billy is seated as far away from him as physically possible, with those long, long legs extended in an effort to keep him at bay. 

“I...” Jim clears his throat. “It’s okay if you don’t want to have kids, you know. I didn’t...” hells, why is this so hard? “Look, I know that a lot of alphas would be more than happy to keep a pretty little thing like you barefoot and pregnant, but... if that’s not what you want...”

Billy doesn’t look away from his novel. In fact, he does very little to indicate that he’d heard Jim speak at all. And it’s... rather infuriating, truthfully, but he knows that he needs to keep a level head. Nothing good will come from snapping at Billy now. 

“And... if you  _ want _ to... there are... alternatives, you know?” He doesn’t want to push, but if Billy had only gotten defensive because he’s worried about his own ability to carry to term, then... “A-And if you really  _ don’t _ , then there’s options for that, as well.”

Billy frowns, the sides of his mouth warbling a bit, “Y-You want me to get my tubes tied?” He silently curses his utter inability to keep his voice from wavering.

Jim makes a point of looking anywhere but at Billy’s face, “I... was actually thinking that I could get a vasectomy.”

“I-I don’t... That’s not...” And Billy, he doesn’t know what to say. It’s touching, in a way, but it seems rather like trying to fit a square peg into a triangular hole. It’s a solution, but not a solution to his particular problem. “W-We can just use condoms, or... or I could go on the pill. You... I couldn’t force you to－,”

“You’re not forcing me to do anything.” He says firmly, like he needs to make sure that Billy believes it.

Billy’s eyes flutter down to the book once more, “I don’t... I don’t know what I want, exactly. But it isn’t that.”

“Okay.” He says. He lets out a breath that sounds almost relieved. “Look, I... I am in  _ no way _ claiming to be the poster child for emotional competence. But you... you’ve been shutting me out, lately. And I feel like there’s something you’re not telling me.”

Billy turns the page. He’s more than halfway through the book, and he’d just started it earlier that day. “There’s no point trying to lie to you. You can feel my emotions through our bond, after all.”

“You feel frightened.”

“Of course I do,” Billy says, with a smile that doesn’t quite reach his eyes, “You told me that you’re cooking dinner tonight.” It was meant to be funny, but the joke, just like everything else as of late, falls painfully flat. 

Billy tries to be a bit more open, after that. Let’s Jim touch him, even if it’s just a quick peck on the cheek, the chief’s beard tickling his freshly-shaved, baby soft skin. He manages to stave off sex until his next heat hits, and knows he’s fucked as soon as his fucked-out brain registers that his heat had triggered his alpha’s rut. They’d tried to use condoms, but Jim’d managed to  _ snap _ one with his fucking knot and that was the end of that. He found himself pregnant  _ again _ . Hoping  _ again _ . He makes it to three months and a day, because Mother Nature is a cruel,  _ heartless _ bitch, and he bites his tongue and doesn’t say a word. 

He thinks about starting suppressants, but Hawkins is still part of an ever-dwindling number of cities that require an omega’s alpha to be present and to consent to a prescription. And it’s not... He doesn’t think that Jim would say  _ no _ . Rather, he knows that his mate would say yes, and that’s part of what’s holding him back. Does that even make sense? He doesn’t know anymore. He’s stopped trying to understand the hurt, deciding instead that it is easier to embrace it. Hiding behind a mask of pain and anger is familiar to him, except this time, it’s not directed at the world, at his  _ father _ . It’s directed at himself. 

The doctor finds an anomaly at his next check-up.

“She put me on the pill.” He tells Jim. He should feel relieved. He doesn’t know why he feels like this is just another in a laundry list of failures. “The, uh... The m-miscarriage did some damage...  _ internally _ ... and she wants... she w-wants to give my body a break before...  _ if _ ... we try a-again.” 

And Jim is absolutely livid, “Billy, that was what, nine months ago? And you’re telling me that this just...  _ slipped _ under the radar, all this time.” He  _ should _ tell him. He  _ needs _ to tell him. “What the hell kind of doctor misses something so serious?” 

Billy shakes his head, “It’s not...  _ serious _ . I just... My body just needs a little break, is all.”

“Billy,” Jim places his hands on the younger’s shoulders, squeezing tight. He doesn’t miss the way that the omega flinches and tries to fold in on himself. This isn’t like Billy at all. “It  _ is _ serious if it’s affecting your health. You know that things are  _ different _ now.”

Billy frowns, “I don’t like what you’re implying.”

Jim stares at him levelly, “I wasn’t aware that I was implying anything. I thought that I’d been rather straightforward.”

“I’m not...  _ fragile _ , or－or  _ breakable _ , or whatever the hell else you’re  _ not _ implying.” The blond hisses, “Just because I had my insides rearranged by that... that  _ thing _ ... it doesn’t mean shit.”

“It means  _ everything _ , Billy!” And Jim, he’s gotten mad at him before. He’s  _ yelled _ at him before. But something about the way that he’s yelling at him now just hits Billy in all the wrong ways. “Fuck, you  _ really _ just don’t get it, do you? There’s a very real chance I’ll wake up one morning to find that you’ve  _ drowned _ in the middle of the night because your right lung filled with fluid while you slept. That’s not  _ normal _ , Billy!”

“Well, I’m sorry that I’m such a fucking  _ burden _ －,” and he knows that that’s not what Jim’s saying, not really, but that doesn’t matter. “I didn’t－I didn’t ask for－,”

And his chest  _ hurts _ , though he’s not sure whether this is the result of his excitement or the pulsing ache in his lung. He starts coughing, and there’s  _ blood _ , and he supposes that answers that question. And also costs him the argument, which he’s irrationally pissed about. Jim puts him to bed like he’s fucking  _ five _ and he hates it－hates that his dumb fucking body isn’t strong enough to hold out for the duration of one goddamned argument. An argument that they wouldn’t even need to be having if he hadn’t of gotten out of his car that night and－

The pills work. His body heals. Well, it heals as much as it’s able, given the circumstances. 

Jim comes with him to his next doctor’s appointment and mentions the coughing, the  _ blood _ . The doctor runs all sorts of tests, orders some bloodwork... The results are not surprising in the least. The scar tissue on his right lung had become irritated, causing the lung to fill with fluid. The doctor suggested he quit the Nicorette again (he’d only started up again once the doctor put him on the pill) and take up something innocuous in its stead. Like lollipops.

Fucking  _ lollipops _ .

* * *

One white stick. Two blue lines. A pipe dream that’ll never be realized. 

He hadn’t told Jim he’d stopped taking the pill－which was bad; he  _ knew _ that it was bad, but he wanted a child so badly and he knew what Jim would say. Worse, he knew how it would hurt Jim to know that he’d lost another child. 

So he’d run away. Literally. Hidden himself away in plain sight. Just until he knew, definitively, the story he’d tell Jim. But then the weeks had turned to months, and the heartbreak, the pain, the devastating  _ loss _ －it never came. 

It wasn’t real until the nurse laid a wrinkly, red-faced baby girl on his chest... and even then, some part of his mind was still convinced that this was all just some figment of his imagination. That he was still sitting in that bathtub, beneath a shower of ice-cold water, wondering how everything had gone so very wrong. He names her Stagger Lee, after the murderer in one of his favorite  _ Grateful Dead _ songs. It’s half for the irony of naming the child of the Chief of Police after a fictitious murderer, and half because he knows, down to the very fiber of his being, that Jim would never let him name her Zeppelin. 

He shows up to the cabin a few days later. His key still fits the lock on the door. Jim is seated on the couch, surrounded by plumes of bluish-gray smoke, and drowning in a sea of beer bottles. Billy wrinkles his nose, and Stagger sneezes so hard, she scares herself right into a sobbing fit. His alpha turns to him, then, apparently not having heard him come in the front door－and unable to smell him over the stale stench of alcohol and tobacco－and the half-full bottle of beer slips out from between his fingers, shattering on the ground. He descends on them, squeezing Billy tight in a hug that hurts in all the best ways.

“Is this why you－,” he starts. 

“This is Stagger Lee, your－,” Billy says, at the same time. 

“Y-You didn’t need to... I never  _ expected _ you to...” Stagger stares up at Jim with big, blue eyes, and they’re so very similar to Billy’s that they take his breath away. She coos at him softly, already so aware despite only being a few days old. 

“I know. I wanted to.” He says. And then, “D’you want to hold her? She’s kinda heavy. I think she inherited your beer belly.” Jim snorts, but carefully takes the baby anyhow. She gives an irritated little chirp, before settling down in his arms. 

The moment is everything he could have ever dreamed of and so much more. Then－

“...You do realize that Stagger Lee murders a  _ Billy _ in that song, right?”

Billy snorts, playfully whacking his alpha on the shoulder. “Shut up!”


End file.
